Father Casey and
Me

January 17,
2008

Of late, literally
struggling to survive (your prayers are most welcome), I have sought the
consolations of the rosary, my family and friends, and a few books. Among
these are Bernard Ruffins excellent 1991 biography of St. Padre Pio,
Padre Pio: The True Story, and a smaller book from 1968
about another great saint, Father Solanus Casey, The Porter of St.
Bonaventures, by James Patrick Derum.

Father
Casey, like Padre Pio, was a Capuchin friar who has been
credited with countless healing miracles. He was born and raised in
Wisconsin, near the Minnesota border at a narrow part of the Mississippi
River, in a large Irish Catholic family, and some friends of mine from that
area, also devout Irish Catholics named Casey as it happens, believe they are
related to him.

Father Casey died in 1957 (Pio died in 1968) after spending
most of his adult life in a monastery in my native Detroit. My aunt Pauline
Sobran, God bless her sweet soul, became devoted to his memory late in her
life. Renowned for his sweet temper, he was what in those days was called a
simplex priest, of restricted faculties. That is, he was permitted to say Mass
but not to hear confessions. He was largely confined to menial tasks that
most priests would find humiliating, though he never complained.

Most of Father Caseys free time, as a result, was
given to counseling troubled people, who flocked to him and basked in the
remarkable warmth and sweet humor of his personality. Many an alcoholic,
after a single interview with him, became intensely devout and never took
another sip of liquor. Others recovered from such serious physical ailments
as cancer, polio, diabetes, cataracts, concussions, and goiters, to name a
few,
not to mention all sorts of anxieties and worries, the devils devices
for destroying our inner peace.

I can relate a remarkable incident of my own about this holy
man. Some years ago, around 1987, perhaps, I clipped an article about him
from the weekly Catholic press. Then I lost it. With great frustration I
searched for it for hours in vain; it was something I would never have
knowingly thrown away, so I was baffled by its disappearance. But I finally
gave up looking for it. Somehow I had managed to lose this item, worthless to
anyone but me.

I had nearly forgotten about it when I got home from Mass
one dark Sunday evening in November. A strong, chilly wind was blowing as I
got out of my car. I picked up a page of a newspaper the wind had whipped
across the yard at my feet. It was the missing article about Father Casey!

Which
of course proved nothing. I didnt need a logician to tell me it could have been
mere chance that somehow carried it back to me, like a fish in some old tale
that turns out to have swallowed a precious ring. If you want to reject the
supernatural explanation, you can always posit coincidence or conspiracy. An
explanation may be perfectly logical without being reasonable. Think of all the
clever people who deny the resurrection of Jesus and uphold materialist
theories of evolution.

As usual, I digress. But I knew why that article had turned up
as surely as if Father Casey, his blue Irish eyes twinkling, had personally
handed it to me. And I think this is the way we usually experience a miracle in
our own lives: as a kind of small, loving joke, just between
ourselves, that nobody else would get, as intimate as a kiss.

This may be how God prefers to speak to us, not with
spectacular public signs whose meaning nobody can miss or deny, but with an
ambiguity that demands our faith. After all, Jesus himself, even after
stunning the multitudes with his healing powers, often complained that their
faith was so weak that they would not believe him without seeing marvels, as
if he were just a magic act.

He wanted them to accept him for his words, not his
wonders. Heaven and earth shall pass away, he said,
but my words shall not pass away. And of course those simple
words are what we do remember most, the quiet but mighty words that,
spoken, not written by him, have made this a different world for all time.

In the same way, Father Casey didnt want praise as a
worker of wonders. To God went all the credit for any cures that occurred
after his prayers.

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